Conventional approaches to transporting mobile, business, and residential service traffic have dedicated different parallel networks to transporting the traffic of different services. More recent approaches, by contrast, contemplate transporting the traffic of those different services together using the same network. Converging the different parallel networks into one common network in this way would prove more efficient and cost-effective.
Aggregating the traffic of multiple services at the packet level through so-called packet aggregation presents one option for realizing such a “converged” network. But while packet aggregation currently requires less hardware expense, it proves difficult to scale as traffic volume increases and involves significant complexity. Aggregating the traffic of multiple services in the optical domain, e.g., using wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), is more promising in this regard. However, one obstacle to realizing a converged WDM optical network is optical port discovery.